Fertility

UC Irvine will host a four-day ethics conference on reproductive medicine next month in the wake of a human egg-swapping scandal that drew international headlines and rocked the infertility field. University officials said the conference was organized to make a "positive contribution" to the field and to confront issues raised by allegations against three doctors at UCI's now-closed Center for Reproductive Health. The trio--Ricardo H. Asch, Jose P.

The Orange County district attorney's office is trying to determine whether one of the nation's foremost fertility experts broke any laws in the handling of human eggs at his multimillion-dollar UC Irvine clinic. Investigators are particularly interested in whether Dr. Ricardo H.

Offering new evidence that could support a fiercely debated theory that male fertility is decreasing because of environmental pollution, French researchers reported today that average sperm counts of Parisian men have declined by one-third in the last 20 years. The analysis of more than 1,300 healthy men at a Paris sperm bank confirms the findings of several other European studies that sperm volumes have decreased dramatically over the last 50 years.

Attempting to recoup millions of dollars spent on legal settlements, the UC Board of Regents voted Friday to sue the doctors who ran the scandal-ridden fertility clinic at UC Irvine. The regents want Ricardo H. Asch, Jose P. Balmaceda and Sergio C. Stone to reimburse them for more than $19 million that the university has agreed to pay infertile couples who sought help at the once acclaimed but now defunct Center for Reproductive Health.

Federal prosecutors charged Tuesday that Dr. Sergio Stone and his two partners at UC Irvine's Center for Reproductive Health were "partners in crime" who lied on medical documents to dupe insurance companies and reap extra profits. But Stone's defense attorney told a U.S. District Court jury that "the wrong person is on trial" and insisted that his client has broken no laws.

Dr. Ricardo H. Asch, a key figure in the UC Irvine fertility clinic scandal, concluded four days of sworn testimony Monday, acknowledging the grief of patients whose eggs and embryos apparently were taken without their consent and admitting that he shared some responsibility.

Montezuma II made what proved to be a fatal mistake when he assumed that the strange white creatures who landed on this Yucatan island in 1518 were the legendary plumed serpent god Quetzalcoatl, and his coterie of lesser Aztec deities, even sending food and gifts to the invaders as tribute. The "gods" were Spaniards under Capt.

Couples who have sought help from fertility clinics in Orange County to conceive children are asking lots of questions in the wake of the UCI clinic allegations, local doctors and counselors said Friday. They wonder, for instance, whether embryos and sperm they have stored at the clinics have been used without their knowledge for research or have created children now living with other families.

The space shuttle Endeavour's astronauts kept tabs Monday on two fish with electrodes attached to their brains and learned they had scored a space first--fertilizing eggs produced by frogs in orbit. "It's the first time we've had ovulation (in space) in a higher species, in this case the amphibian," said principal investigator Ken Souza of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "We've also had fertilization. . . .